Holden Caulfield, Curator

Growing up outside Milan in a town he likened to Newark, Mr. Gioni found himself drawn to art precisely because there were no adults talking to him about it. "It didn't belong to the school or the teachers," he said. "It was mine."

When he was 14, he started reading the Futurists and the Dadaists--he can still recite by heart Tristan Tzara's Manifesto of Mister Antipyrine--and listening to Sonic Youth, Fugazi, and Dinosaur Jr. He also started looking at the pictures in Artforum and Flash Art, and loving what he saw "because it was so strange."

But when I first read Tristan Tzara's 1918 Dada manifesto in college, as a kid still angry over my parents' messy divorce and the messy new relationships that followed, I was moved by Tzara's childlike claim that "every product of disgust that is capable of becoming a negation of the family is dada." If the family, like art, could not be a strong, safe nest, then it had to be abolished; it's less painful to do away with families than to watch them fail. (Dada was always from the perspective of a disillusioned child.)

Either we're in a neo-Dadaist moment right now, or Tzara's Manifestos are the Catcher in the Rye of the art world. [via jason]